Founded in 1990, Jamba Juice is a food and beverage retailer headquartered in Emeryville, California, with over 800 locations operating in 26 states, the Bahamas, Canada, the Philippines, Mexico and South Korea. The company’s mission is to become the world’s leading blender of fruit and other natural, healthy ingredients.

The Challenge: Enabling secure access to critical applications for remote workers in India

For Jamba Juice, running a lean organization is key to offering fresh, healthy foods at an affordable price. To that end, the company formed a partnership with Cap Gemini—one of the world’s largest consulting and outsourcing firms—in an effort to move the majority of Jamba Juice’s accounting, finance, HR and IT functions to Bangalore. “We needed to find a secure way to connect 50 individuals from India with all of our systems and processes here in the U.S.,” says Raul Celorio, senior manager of IT infrastructure and operations at Jamba Juice. “And believe it or not, we only had 90 days to make it happen.”

The Solution: Deploying applications halfway around the world in a highly regulated environment

With a deadline fast approaching, Celorio and his team didn’t have time to run a formal pilot. Instead, they needed to find a partner to help them plan and deploy a solution on the fly. That’s where Citrix partner Entisys Solutions came in. “Entisys understood what we needed right away,” says Celorio. “At our very first meeting, one of their engineers whiteboarded an architecture so I could visualize all the moving parts. That gave me a huge amount of confidence. Then they followed through with an implementation that was easily the smoothest I’ve ever seen, adapting beautifully to our changing requirements.”

Citrix technology was at the heart of the Entisys solution. Citrix XenApp enables the delivery of critical applications, even in Jamba Juice’s highly secure payment card industry (PCI) environment that handles customers’ sensitive credit card data. Two Citrix NetScaler Application Delivery Controllers load-balance requests to the Citrix StoreFront server, helping ensure the best possible experience for end users. And with Citrix XenDesktop Platinum Edition, the Jamba Juice team has access to a truly comprehensive and flexible virtual desktop solution with the most advanced management, monitoring and security tools available. “In just 60 days, we were able to generate an image, implement an infrastructure and successfully support a large number of users in a heavily regulated business process,” says Celorio. “I couldn’t be happier with the end result. In fact, the only major issue we’ve encountered is that we actually ran out of licenses, so I went ahead and purchased 50 more.”

Key Benefits

With Citrix technology, a user sitting in Bangalore, Mumbai or Kolkata can log in to a virtual desktop in Emeryville, then gain access to a Jamba Juice store in New York City—all with minimal performance degradation. “Even with users halfway around the world, the latency is almost unnoticeable,” says Celorio. “That’s astonishing. Better yet, I’m running a Citrix implementation for 100 users with just one system administrator here in Emeryville.”

Citrix Director enhances security by offering full visibility across the Jamba Juice environment. “Cap Gemini is a on a segregated VLAN, so we need to track who’s accessing what and when for different regulatory purposes,” says Celorio. “Before, we would need to look in several different places to see which users were using which resources. But with Citrix Director, I have one location where I can go to answer those questions. Just as important, XenApp and XenDesktop enable us to create policies so that each user can always find the resources they need, without gaining access to the resources they don’t.”

Providing fast, effective support to remote users on demand

Citrix technology makes it easy for the Jamba Juice IT team to provide on-demand support for remote workers in India. “We can respond to support requests more easily than ever,” says Celorio. “It’s so simple for us to send the user a message, request control of their machine and shadow the session. There’s often a bit of a language barrier, too, so the ability to see exactly what the user is seeing is invaluable.”

Looking Ahead

Just two months after implementation, other departments are already requesting their own Citrix environments. “We’re mostly a Microsoft shop, but we do have a few Mac users in creative and legal,” says Celorio. “For a small IT organization like ours, those Macs can be difficult to maintain, because it’s hard to justify having an Apple technician for just a handful of users. With help from Citrix technology, we can incorporate those machines more seamlessly into our environment, which will go a long way toward reducing the administrative burden for our IT staff.”

Even with users halfway around the world, the latency is almost unnoticeable. That’s astonishing. Better yet, I’m running a Citrix implementation for 100 users with just one system administrator here in Emeryville.